Semester wrap-up.

Hey family and friends,

It's about 7:00 am on the last day in which I have coursework to do for EMU this semester. I have a couple of brief papers to finish up, and then I'm going to head over to campus at some point this afternoon to put them in my prof.'s mailbox. As you can probably guess, I'm not going to be taking any classes next semester, but I might decide to sign-up for something in the evening in the Spring or Summer. We shall see. It depends on a lot of things . . .

In any case, it feels quite good to have made it through this semester without going into labor early and having catch-up work to do after the baby's arrival.

My nights of sleep are getting very weird: I've had these hour-long blocks of time in which I'm completely awake, right in the middle of the night. I'll go downstairs to eat a snack or see what's been updated on cnn.com in the last few hours, and after an hour or so I'll be able to go upstairs to sleep again (at least until my next bathroom break!). A couple of nights ago it was from 4:00-5:00 am, and last night it was from 2:30-3:30. I know that Brian is having a tougher time sleeping consistently as well; we concluded yesterday that it's probably the increasing anxiety of the "any day now" feeling. For me, there's the unknown of what labor pain is going to be like mixed-in there, too. A BIG dose of that. But, as I'll explain in the next paragraph, that anxiety is really only manifesting itself at night . . .

Something odd has been happening for the last few days. I think I hit my peak of baby anticipation about 1 1/2 weeks ago, sometime in week 38, and I'm starting to feel that "I guess this is going to last forever" feeling that other people have described to me. Despite the fact that I can't sleep in the middle of the night due to nerves, I have long stretches of time during the day when I just feel like, "well, this is my new body, and I guess I'm going to have to get used to it." Isn't that strange? Perhaps that's a bit of a defense mechanism that my brain has constructed; if I really was thinking about how close all of these changes in my life actually are, that might be a bit too overwhelming to consistently carry around in my mind.

Brian and I went to Zingerman's on Sunday to choose the cheeses that we're going to smuggle in to the hospital for after the baby's arrival. We settled on a nice, mellow, aged sheep's milk cheese, and a funky, stinky, awesome Roquefort. Brian might need some accomplices in this task, because the plan is to drive to Zingerman's to get the cheeses after labor has started, and also to pack up my 1996 Chateau Gazin Bordeaux wine and a couple of glasses from our basement. :) We, of course, will be sharing all of this yummy-ness.